IBM OPENS NEW CLOUD RESILIENCY CENTER

Mobile Banking Company Monitise Taps IBM to Ensure Always on Business Operations

 IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced the opening of its new cloud resiliency center in Research Triangle Park (RTP), North Carolina. The new cloud resiliency center provides state-of-the-art business continuity capabilities in the cloud to protect companies from potential costly disruptions.

 Monitise, a world leader in mobile money, is the first mobile-centric technology enabling business to use the new center. With more than 30 million registered users and the value of payments and transfers across its platforms worth $88 billion annually, Monitise turned to IBM to help the company expand its mobile banking, payments and commerce ecosystem at cloud resilience centers in RTP and Boulder. By having IBM manage its secure cloud infrastructure, the company will be able to establish a resilient and highly flexible bank-grade architecture allowing Monitise to deliver uninterrupted service to its clients.

IBM is working with enterprise clients around the world as they take advantage of cloud and mobile computing as growth opportunities.

“Banking, paying and buying on mobile is becoming an increasingly integral and recognizable part of daily life – so for us as a Mobile Money provider, delivering a quality, always-on service is essential,” said Adam Banks, EVP Technology at Monitise. “As we expand globally, this partnership with IBM allows us to provide a consistent, reliable customer service while having in place a proven cloud resiliency plan that ensures us that no matter the issue, our real-time service capabilities will not be impacted.”

In the new IBM Cloud Resiliency Center in Research Triangle Park, Mark Dean (left) project manager, reviews with cloud specialist Michael Flaig the plan to protect a financial institution from losing its data in the event of a natural disaster. The new cloud center provides state-of-the-art business continuity capabilities in the cloud to ensure that businesses can recover vital data in minutes, making any incident virtually invisible to the customer.

Cloud  and mobility computing have fostered an “always on” expectation for application and data access. According to a survey by the Ponemon Institute, a substantial outage—one lasting more than an hour or two—costs a company more than $32,000 a minute on average. In addition, since any outage can be reported on social media within seconds, the longer systems remain down, the greater the impact will be on a company’s reputation and future revenue.

“The work we’re doing with Monitise at this new cloud resiliency center is a strong testament to IBM partnerships with enterprise clients to drive new innovation,” said Mike Errity, Vice President, IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services. “By creating a new benchmark for delivering client continuity services in hybrid, public and private cloud environments, we meet the demands of businesses required to serve the around the clock needs of their clients.”

IBM’s new resiliency center integrates cloud and traditional disaster recovery capabilities with innovative physical security features. With cloud resiliency services, the recovery time of 24 to 48 hours that was once deemed the industry standard has shrunk dramatically to a matter of minutes. Open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the resiliency center team will monitor developing disaster events and then mobilize as needed to ensure that the infrastructure for all customers is configured to handle the latest threats to keep data, applications, people and transactions secure.

The overall market opportunity for business continuity and disaster recovery is expected to grow to almost $32 billion by 2015. As a recognized risk leader for more than 50 years, IBM has met its commitment to recover clients during every event from wide-scale natural disasters to unplanned outages from human error. Now through this leading industry investment, IBM delivers even greater value by providing customers integrated traditional and cloud base recovery capabilities.

This year, IBM will also be opening two new cloud based resiliency centers in Mumbai, India and Izmir, Turkey. These new facilities— which will join the 15 other global centers planned by SoftLayer and 150 resiliency centers— will speed up recovery times by virtually eliminating network latency while allowing businesses to manage federal and local data residency compliance regulations.